The Economy….
FOR THEM…
Simple….
This is largely about people moving from the “Obama helped” column to the “Obama made no difference” column, but it’s somewhat telling when it comes to comparing his personal popularity to the results of the 2016 election. Trump’s win wasn’t a large-scale rebuke of Obama’s policies — Clinton won the popular vote, after all — but it did reflect lingering uneasiness with the direction in which our country’s political leaders have taken us. The status quo was largely fine, and Obama is an affable and likable politician whose personal appeal has persisted even as his policies have come under fire in recent years.
But stagnation loomed in Americans’ views of their personal situations. And that helps explain why the economically struggling Rust Belt delivered Trump the presidency.
As I’ve written before, there were plenty of people who liked Obama just fine but voted for Trump in the 2016 election — 17 percent of Trump’s base of support, in fact, according to a poll from The Washington Post and the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. Many of these voters appeared to be at least somewhat loyal to the Republican Party but thought Obama was a fine president.
On Election Day, they pulled the lever for Trump. And at least part of the reason appears to be that they didn’t see the economic recovery in their own lives. So why not try something different — or even very different?
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